Making mistakes is an integral part of software development just like any other profession or any other thing in life. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “The only man who never does a mistake is the man who never does anything”. This implies that while you are doing something constructive; you commit mistakes and then re-correct them only to sharpen your development skills. This is the way you learn and evolve as a developer. However, the scenario changes when you make mistakes while building a WordPress website; after launch you find it difficult to address those issues and get trapped in the whirlwind of those mistakes.
Here we will discuss five common mistakes that developers at a highly professional WordPress Web Design Agency always avoid while developing a website:
Using default WordPress settings
Forgetting to change the default settings such as username admin is leaving your site vulnerable to hackers. Moreover, forgetting to change the default permalink structure would make it difficult for search engine bots to read your URL structure; thus affecting your search engine ranking drastically. So, make sure to optimize your site settings according to your website’s specific requirements.
Upgrading parent theme without creating a child theme
Tweaking your parent theme without creating a child theme is a very grave mistake that you can’t ignore. It would make you lose all your modifications whenever you update or customize it later.
Forgetting to enable the built-in debugging feature
Always remember to turn on the debugging feature while adding custom code to your WordPress website so that you are notified whenever any issue occurred in your site. Otherwise you will not receive alerts about any issue that is ruining your website.
Forgetting to remove the admin bar
Do not forget to disable the admin bar; otherwise it will be visible to your visitors, which in fact must be visible for the administrators of your website only. Get the specific piece of code to disable the admin bar from experts at your WordPress specialist agency.
Failing to stop search engines from indexing your site
Although indexing is good for SEO, you must stop search engine bots to index your site until you are completely done with it and have created permalink structure. You may get penalized for having duplicate content if search engines find it difficult to crawl your site because of indexing different pieces of indistinguishable content.
Installing tons of plugins
Even though plugins enable you to enhance the functionality of your website, you must keep in mind that having too many plugins would slow down your website by increasing the load on server, thus hampering the performance of your website.
Wish you a happy and safe WordPress website development!
